Many thanks to Bill Hecht for cleaning up this intriguing image from the CSNY collection.  I have an idea about the celebration, but I’ll save my understanding until the end of the post so that you can develop your own thoughts.  It’s a busy image, lots going on, text on boats and the building in the center, incongruous combinations.  Let’s walk through it.

Canoeists in feathered regalia paddle the waterway in the foreground, but the people on the roof, others standing on boats, others . . . they are not looking at the canoeists.

The range of boats here is amazing.

I wish I could make out the name on the stern of the steamer in the center, but the white steamer along the right side of the image is the first key for me.  It’s a sidewheel steamer.  Know it?

But once I figured out the flag above and to the left of the words “Jersey City,” I came up with the date of the image.  October 5, 1909.  Know how?

Scroll through this link and you’ll see a photo of that same ice house taken in February 1909 in Kingston NY.  So what would bring such a diverse throng to Rondout Creek.  Here’s where the sidewheeler I called the first key comes in:  that is paddle towboat Norwich, 1836 until 1923.  More on Norwich here. According to this link, it took part in the “centenary celebrations of the world’s first commercial steamboat in 1909.”  Those centenary celebrations were also referred to as the Hudson-Fulton Celebration.  Scroll through that link and you’ll get the date the traveling celebration got to Kingston.  But the flag was the clencher;  it’s the flag of the VOC, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, aka the Dutch East India Company.  The VOC flag here flies off the stern of the 1909 replica of Half Moon.  This leaves one question:  what is everyone looking at?  I think it’s what’s missing in the photo:  the 1909 replica of North River Steamboat, aka Clermont, built on Staten Island in 1909 and scrapped in 1936.  Scroll through here for more details.

NYS canals will have their own celebration for the ages this year.  What images of 2025 will folks be looking at a century from now?

Let me reiterate an invitation to join the Canal Society of New York to learn more.